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Engineering Is the Way to Go!

So the last 3+ months I’ve been working as a translator for Samsung Engineering. The job is not as exciting as it sounds and I quickly learned that I picked the wrong career (for now). I don’t make anything near what the lowest paid engineer gets paid. How do I know this? In Mexico there is a higher degree of transparency that never ceases to amaze me. People talk about their salaries as though it were a school exam grade. As a matter of fact, at my previous employer, in order to receive your paycheck you had to sign a payroll document that included everyone’s name and their respective salaries!

I wish my high school would have done a better job of explaining the concept of engineering as a career. They always spoke of it in vague terms as a “great” career and that you “need to be good at math” and that somehow it’s related to computers. I don’t ever remember seeing or hearing practical examples of jobs within the various engineering fields. All I remember is teachers throwing out the words “mechanical engineer,” “civil engineer,” “computer engineer,” etc. Even to this day I’m still not sure what they mean. More importantly, why didn’t they mention how much money they make?! Holy Moly! I guess that’s what college is for, but even then there are only so many classes you can take a year and the first two years are filled with general graduation requirements. So if you missed the boat with math, either say hello to long summer school sessions filled with derivatives or ride that huge learning curve when you get to your masters program.

Math was always my strongest subject. I took calculus my senior year and when we got to the derivatives section, a part of my soul died everyday. Staring at dooky and watching it decompose would have been more interesting. Maybe I’m responsible for shutting my brain down and alienating myself from the math department in college. I know for a fact that if I would have envisioned a specific job within any of the engineering fields that caught my interest in high school, I would have pursued it in college. Unfortunately, engineering in high school as a whole was just a term thrown around to make one sound sophisticated. That’s why I decided to pursue sociological engineering 🙂